Thursday, July 28, 2005

The nice folks over at eBig (Hi Kristen!) are doing a membership drive. If you are interested at all please Join eBig as they are a wonderful organization that is doing good work out in the East Bay. They work with TVNUG to help us get the word out about our meetings. TVNUG is the Network Technology SIG for eBig and they just recently added the East Bay Cisco Users Group to the SIG list under the Telecom listing. At a minimum it is worth signing up to their many lists to get information about cool user group meetings going on in the East Bay.- Ed

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

MSN Virtual Earth just turned up and while not as smooth as Google Maps it has better detail in the Aerial photos that is uses. As a fun time waster you can also check out Google Moon which has all the locations of the Apollo landings. It is actually very cool.
- Ed

Monday, July 25, 2005

I have been playing with Microsoft's new product from Groove Virtual Office that they acquired from their Groove Network's purchase. I have to admit it is a very cool idea. I hope to use it for work I do with SFNTUG and other user groups.
- Ed

DEF CON 13 is July 29-31, 2005, Fri-Sun in Las Vegas at the Alexis Park Hotel. I know a few folks who are planning on attending this year. If you go, have fun, and don't turn your laptop on - haha.
- Ed

Friday, July 22, 2005

Well Cisco and Yahoo combined their message signing technologies into DomainKeys Identified Mail or DKIM. This is basically Cisco Identified Internet Mail and Yahoo DomainKeys getting submitted jointly to the IETF. It will most likely get experimental status like SenderID did.
My personal belief is that you are going to see SPF and DKIM become more widely deployed within the next year. Yahoo and Google both support DomainKeys and there are extensions to do DomainKeys and Identified Internet Mail available now.
Yet another Anti-Spam Solution (YAAS) to keep track of.
- Ed

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Lasso Logic presented at the TVNUG meeting this evening. They have a very interesting appliance and service built around continuous data protection (CDP) and it is targeted at small and medium sized businesses. They seem to have addressed a lot of issues that small business owners have in trying to figure out how to backup and recover lost data. They store files on a local appliance for fast recovery but also push the data out to an online service (similar to all the "vault" services out there). That way, in case of total disaster you still have access to data stores. The product uses an agent to do continuous backups to the appliance so they encourage businesses to run the agent on all machines, not just servers.For businesses that are to small to be able to afford VTL and SAN/NAS with snapshotting features this might be a serious consideration.- Ed

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

If you are at all interested in DNS and how it is run on the Internet today there are a couple of cool sites you need to check out. Have you ever wondered who runs all the root level servers? Then visit the Root Server Technical Operations Assn website. There is also a great write up over at Internet Systems Consortium about their management of the F-Root. I highly recommend reading through the Hierarchical Anycast technique which is used for many of the root level servers. They even give you their peering information. Very cool.
- Ed